Perimeter of a Crash
by mayhit
Summary: The real question, i guess, is why dance?
1. Chapter 1

_Title: Perimeter of a Crash._

_Description: "The real question, I guess, is why dance?"_

_Disclaimer: nope._

_Notes: always wanted to get up the courage to write a CSI fic. Deliciously intelligent characters make it quite the task. Figured I may as well start on a toughie and go with Grissom-centric. If I don't get reviews I probably won't bother with more fics because, damn this stuff takes time._

_EXTRA SPECIAL IMPORTANT NOTES! _

_You maybe shouldn't try to follow the timeline first go. It works, I swear to you but I definitely recommend you read it twice for comprehension. It tends to… jump._

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**And** oh, he's seen it before. Women usually. Always arguing different forms of the same _un_reason.

And oh, he's loved this before.

**The victim:**

Grade twelve. Grissom sitting in the back row with a dull pencil and an unused eraser, waiting for the teacher to make a suggestion: "Gilbert, why don't you give Miss Cristine a hand?" And he stands, looks down to the front and wonders, "All right. What page?"

Maria Cristine is tall and gently blonde. She is loud with the boys and quiet with him and sometimes when he asks her, "Okay, so what did you get for number thirty eight?" she will grimace- drop her pencil, eraser first onto the page and declare in a rush, "Listen, I've got it, okay? I don't need this shit!"

Maria Cristine's hair falls out too much. There are columns of numbers jotted amidst the backs of all her pages. There are mysteries in her mind, perhaps. Nobody notices, but Grissom does.

**Accomplice:**

A woman kidnapped and an anxious, wealthy husband. Three hours in a chopper and when it lurches suddenly- catching slight turbulence, Sara is already leaning forward, searching for a flashlight in her kit. In the dark cab Grissom witnesses her forehead knock against the unforgiving dashboard- cringes invisibly at the sound it makes, doesn't move. When she looks across the cab at him, he identifies the look that flares in her eyes. Confusion.

Always the question with them: _"Do you care?"_ and perhaps furthermore, _"If so, what does that mean?"_

Secretly, she makes him want to go a day without analyzing. Ironically, together they make this feat impossible. Neither of them allows any regard for the wounds or the wounded.

On the ground the entire world dissolves into shovels and rocky earth. Their Vic is screaming beneath their feet and Sara falls to her hands and knees, digging with her vulnerable hands before the shovels even arrive.

The woman is pulled, keening and dirty, from a box in the ground. She is whisked away and they are both left adrenalized to stand in the blaring chopper searchlights- wind whipped and suddenly… _needy_.

Sara is looking down, afraid to move least she forget her balance and move towards him instead.

Maybe it is because of what happened in the air, but rather than quoting Poe- "_A Cask D'Amontilado_" would be suiting- he reaches forward and touches her temple where a bruise is forming. He touches her there for the first time- asks her for the second time, "Sara, are you all right?" and when she shudders away he hears her words blown back to him in the violent wind, "It never fails to amaze me what people do to each other."

They return to the city, let down from an impossible high. They have a rush of words for the pilot, the PD, the investigators, yet towards each other they are mute- vulnerable in the post thrill; they may as well have taken separate rides.

And perhaps it is because he requested her to fill his lab in the place of a dead woman. And perhaps it is because she accepted his offer while she was still gulping coffee from a mug at his kitchen counter- but it doesn't come as a surprise when their Vic is lead away in handcuffs, an accomplice in her own burial.

"_Perhaps,"_ they both consider on the flight back that night, _"it is equally amazing what people do to themselves."_

**The circumstances:**

Maria has a difficult math question and Grissom had a spare all morning. He is calm and pensive because Mr. Nashie let him spend his free time in the electronics lab making wax prints of the metal equipment. Now his hands smell like the cinnamon scent of the wax he took from the arts room and his sweater is sharp navy blue and when Maria looks up at him she looks quickly back down again and whispers into the curve of her textbook, "I'm not sure I can ever get this enough."

Not, "right, " Grissom notices she says, "_enough_".

And now he gets it.

She is afraid to fail. In front of him. She has come into this class to struggle and as they both look on at this thing she can't do, she feels shame. He cannot fault her for this.

"You need more protein," he says, but quietly because Dwayne Andrews likes to eaves drop on her constantly. "It triggers the Protein Kinase C to make memory connections in your brain."

Grissom understands aptitude.

**Human relation:**

So he is patient and he is eloquent and when she raises her nails to her false sweet mouth to chew them down he watches her small hands and he says, "You're answer is right, you know."

And when they look in the back, it is.

And she smiles.

**Development of a bias:**

"Like lighter fluid in bulk," grimaces the frenzied brunette he does not yet know. They are spending the January evening pouring over lecture notes at a coffee shop in San Francisco. She is on her second cup of Americano, anticipating her third and explaining, now, that she drinks it black because-

But before she can check off the reasons on her fingers he is doing it for her, reciting, "The calcium will chemically react with the caffeine, actually _causing_ bone density loss and synaptic shortages."

"Steps ahead of me," is her only response, her quick fingers displaying agitation and, if he's honest, some other sensation he will not acknowledge. He would know; he's feeling it too.

The coffee shop they've chosen to inhabit is tiny with even tinier tables of which they are taking up two. Over the process of three hours and- she leans against him to check his watch- fifteen minutes, they have carefully managed to find themselves allied on one side of their tables, pages of their eerily similar and equally illegible scrawl lain out while they converse and now, when their shoulders rub, creating an odd friction of their own accord she shivers and he has to say something to distract them both, immediately.

What he's thinking is Elliot- describing the bodies beneath the London Bridge, passing a friend in the crowd- but what he says instead is, "Why?"

She is confused (by more than his question, really) and begins dog-earing her pages manually, her eyes effectively averted. "Was that supposed to be a complete question? Because your syntax is… non-existent."

And now he smiles, spurred on by the slight chill of the winter sneaking in amongst arriving patrons. "Why do you want more coffee if the flavor is terrible?"

Tomorrow is his last seminar. She will have a question and he will have developed tunnel vision- staring down the center aisle, unable to speak her name. By the end of the afternoon she will be half diverted from him, hot headed and cool hearted and spun. And so it is that when she stands- intentionally interrupting his concluding speech for a dash to the washroom- she will trip, her heel caught on a loop hole in the carpet and with curling tendrils of skin on her palms and elbows, he will be the first one standing over her, forcing any tone from his voice, asking, "Are you all right? Sara? Are you hurt?"

Tomorrow, they both know, is his last seminar but neither of them have ever been very good with tense changes and so they sit and when her answer finally comes he nearly laughs, because it is nearly funny.

"Whenever anyone opens the door," she says, "the wind comes in. I need the cups to hold our papers down."

**Never compromise (the case):**

Tonight they will both go home. He, to travel sized cheep shampoos and she, to lie in bed, covers to her chin and skin that won't stay still. She will fist her sheets in her sleep and wake up thinking, _"Don't you dare get to me."_

For a moment in the buzzing lecture hall he will trace his fingers over the burnt red and sickly white of her palms and slip a tube of Polysporin into her pocket before he's gone.

In the cab to the depot the cabbie will try to make conversation. Grissom will concede eventually, in order to request they stop at "Java Shack". Twenty-four months ago he and Catharine lay on her expensive king size bed, discussing definition.

It is only much later, with the bitter taste of Americano burning his tongue that it will occur to him:

"…_I need the cups to hold our papers down."_

They were fundamentally the same conversation.

**The crime scene:**

A three-story house with two pools like reflections on opposite sides of a glass wall. The outdoor pool is full by the time they get there and the indoor pool is covered in floating blue plastic.

When he was eight, Grissom bought a square of that plastic to examine. He wanted to see how it was made.

"If someone doesn't help them roll it up…" says Grissom but Maria knows better and half laughing she says, "No one will. It's been ripped three times since May."

Her dress is short but with a high collar, which everyone speculates is to cover the bones edging their way around her neck- some brittle frame. Grissom listens for snatches of their names in other's conversations and when she makes her way to the liquor table he watches the tendons straining at the backs of her knees- the painful things inside of her, showing through.

The music is loud and both their eyes are much too wide for a place like this, amongst all the other half drunk bodies. Looking around he wonders at her ability to find her way out into the world at the end of each night.

One day he will understand: all type A's burn out too fast. Some of them find a way to use gravity. Many create their own methods by which to fall.

**Circumstances:**

Forty minutes later they are separated, watching each other across the steaming pool and sipping their drinks in time. Maria is surrounded by four boys with white teeth and two girls with hands that will attach to anyone if left alone for long.

Grissom has found a twenty three year old with a girlfriend whom the older boy hopes to impress. Grissom, struck by the urge to discuss psychological complexes, has baited their conversation along with simple words for complicated ideas. Too simple maybe, and some of the meaning is lost. The twenty three year old is calling it a "jo-rasta complex" and Grissom's mouth is open to correct him when he unexpectedly finds himself laughing.

Grissom notices his own statements have begun to smell like tequila.

**Self medicate:**

Two AM beneath an overpass. Sara is standing under a billboard mouthing words over the roar of traffic. He can't hear either. For just one moment she's as distant as the thirty by fifty foot poster of a dead woman, illuminated behind her.

There will need to come a moment in the future- some early hour, fragile as the flavor of shared chamomile tea- in which he will touch the shadowed notch in her neck, perhaps for luck and say, "I wanted to be the case you couldn't solve."

"To be known" is to surrender one's influence. Beneath the towering lampposts and amidst shopping carts pushed by manic junkies, Grissom is suddenly deaf. Of two initial responses, he chooses relief over panic and says nothing of either. He finds the abstraction of silence to be calming.

If he and Sara are evidence, then their case is compromised eighty times over and Grissom knows: there is no solving _these kind_.

When he was six he took the heavy dictionary from his father's shelf in the hall. His father died that afternoon so it was no surprise when Grissom never forgot: The Oxford Dictionary defined "Influence", in verb form, to mean manipulate.

**Altered:**

"My mother's best friend developed a Jo_rasta_ complex," says the twenty three year old- "_weird_ shit." and Grissom doesn't bother to correct him. He's really more concerned with inferiority at the moment.

He has four drinks in him, icy and electric, when suddenly there is a commotion and he hears the splash and then he looks into the glowing water and sees Maria, swimming weightless in her billowing chiffon dress.

When she waves to him- opens her mouth beneath the surface and smiles, he forgets why it is that he never goes to these parties and he forgets why it is that he never drinks.

The twenty three year old is still talking about his mother's friend's dead husband when Grissom discards his shirt on the edge of the pool- unbuttons his pants. If he angles right he'll catch her foot in his hand.

He takes a breath and raises his arms above his head.

**Post-traumatic:**

Another body like pale plastocine. When Robins pulls glitter from between the toes there is nothing right to say.

"You go, Doc," says Catharine, reminding Grissom that she was once a girl on a stage with cocaine nosebleeds. He wonders if she will stay up till noon, watching cartoons with Lindsay. He wonders if she keeps a film canister at home. Some small amount of, "just in case I need-" and if she's ever fallen asleep, grasping it in tight fisted self-loathing.

**Events triggering actions:**

Half an hour, two ounces of swallowed pool water and three tequila shots after he makes the dive into Jason Jackson's pool, Grissom is shirtless and she is in a lacy black bra and baggy borrowed jeans. Without three too many drinks he would be troubled by the receding borders of their hem lines. Instead he is mesmerized by the odd ripple of her ribs beneath her skin and places a hand to her side, tracing the bones with words he's memorized from an anthropology text.

"This place has three floors," she slurs to which he considers and corrects, "Four if you count the basement."

"And five if you count the attic." Meanwhile, she is linking their shaky hands and getting the better of him in her own unnerving way.

Location:

The third floor of a house he has never been before and Grissom has her rattling against the hallway closet.

"_You're enough,"_ he wants to say but how can he when he can't accept this, even for himself? He has a "_Guide to Physics_" book on his dresser at home. He has vowed to read it by Saturday- has vowed to remember it on Sunday.

Knowledge is a weapon.

So instead he grabs her shoulders, holds on like she might fly apart and when the closet door bumps open a towel comes sliding down onto her tousled head and she chokes, stuttering on the downy smell. She is shaking, hands rough on his belt buckle, buzzing and desperate and, oh god, the only other time he's done this was- and he remembers it was-

She wraps one leg around him now and when he pushes their hips together he realizes that he's going to make this work for her.

"The last time I did this was with my mother's Otolaryngologist," he says. "I was ten." and when she nods she bites his lip and he feels better. Never having told anyone before, he feels better. Her thighs are on his hips.

It's in this way that they grasp and pull and when he mouths the Latin word for 'sex' against her clavicle he can taste chlorine. She has her hand jerking at him through the seam of his pants and she really shouldn't- she really shouldn't- and he thinks- but he wants- god, he _needs_. _right._ _now_.

Yet before she can get his pants quite down, he catches her wrist a moment and runs his tongue over the pale skin between fingers.

"X plus 4b equals you," Grissom whispers- this strange vindication. And later, when she comes, he whispers again, amended: "Everything equals you."

It's the closest thing he can find to what he means.


	2. Chapter 2

_Keep reading. You'll get more confused by the time line and unfinished references before you get less confused by them._

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**Serial:**

Catharine leaves The French Palace for the last time, hollow eyed and hysteric with Ed at her side and Grissom in his car in the parking lot. Ed's got his hands around her wrists- not careful enough, not respectful of her bird's weight ambition and Grissom doesn't understand how this could be what she needs. The lights are off in the cab and he can't get out of his car- hand on the door handle, unable to imagine what he would ever say.

Her shirt is half buttoned and she is not wearing a bra and Grissom thinks, _"Damn it Ed, have you ever wanted to see her off the stage?"_

When she refuses to get in the car- bracing and rigid and still strapped in to her pointy heels, he watches the car door drift soundlessly closed on her fingers.

For a moment there is no reaction and then she cries out, and then she just cries, and the pavement must be cold, finding herself suddenly near alone beside the car.

There is never any warning of these things.

Ten weeks later she reappears, a "vacation" having done her good or so the lie is told- but anyway, she has some color now and Grissom concedes that Ed may have been correct before.

"Vacation my ass," she says, sitting on the couch with her blankets on the floor. She was never one for cover. Grissom, however, reaching out for her wrist, instead drops his hand to the pillow she is gripping and settles on, "Don't dance, Cath. Ed's out, it's just me."

She is quiet a long time and nearly rasping when she whispers, "You almost called me _Cat._"

He finds he doesn't have it in him to apologize, degraded as she is.

**Breaking the case:**

When Maria wakes up on the closet floor he has done up her pants and is doing up his own. "Are you going?" she wonders and Grissom doesn't know what to say- what in the world she would like him to say.

"Home." He whispers and she looks down, hands covering her bare chest. Tugging at the edging corners of lace. There is a moment when he stoops to tie his shoelace. It is wet with spilt beer and he stands, wiping his hands on his pants before turning away. Three steps and she stops him, her voice echoing.

"_Empty hallway or… empty girl?"_ Wonders Grissom with slight morbidity.

"I don't eat sometimes, y'know."

The latter then.

He turns back around, takes two steps towards her, and looks down to the closet floor. He hadn't _known_- he never thought to assume.

"Can we go for some… I don't know, some breakfast or whatever?"

And Grissom wonders if she will die, one day, from all of this.

**Sight recognition:**

It is when Ecklie stands that Grissom remembers…

A 4:19 at The Tangeres. Four days spent over an evidence table and a database with Brass, trying to figure out why a card counter would willingly run himself into an empty casino wing full of locked doors.

"And then kill a guard. Let's not forget that part," Says Brass on the fourth day of dropped casino chips and size ten Ferrigamo shoe prints.

"And then disappear, " adds Grissom with intrigued eyes.

Until 5 AM on the fourth day- "Or does that make it the fifth?" Brass wonders, tired and patched up hard on the buzz of his eighth coffee. "Where's that line- that day marker? We need one."

-That's when Grissom realizes they've been assumptive for 96 hours and it may be time to stop.

"He wasn't a card counter," says Grissom, "that's not his job… He doesn't _have_ a job." And Brass, who is re-printing the dropped chips, has a green one in his hand when he turns to say, "Gil, the guy was a shark. Everybody has a job- I mean, you don't survive in Vegas without some cash flow unless you're-"

And now it's Brass who stops, latex fingers on his fifth green disk.

When the two men check the database they find it. His name is Dean Hamilton and he is in the system, an angry mug shot staring out at them.

"Shmo couldn't get a job- Guy's a convict. Escaped from prison two months back."

And with a raised brow, "Escape… _artist_?"

"None of the casino staff have full clearance. If he could pick his way through the building when they couldn't, he figured he could escape."

So Grissom concludes, "For him, the trick wasn't getting out with the money- it was taking the most difficult path."

"The dead security guard was the last one to see him so..."

"He must have picked a lock or taken a duct."

And at the same time now, both men: "Have they cleared the Scene?"

**The crime scene:**

Fifty meters of blood drops, invisible on red carpet, leads Brass to uncover a knife buried in a potted plant, free of the perpetrator's epithelial's. Fifty meters of hallway footage reveal to Grissom, a half of a brown leather Ferrigamo, stepping into frame and then easily out again. Fifty meters of crawling through ceiling ducts on their hands and knees reveals to the CSI's nothing but a puffer kept secretly in Brass' pocket that, "is not the reason I'm not Chief of Police!"

And it's fifty meters of chalky shoe prints that lead Grissom directly to the power toed foot of Tia Derek.

"The construction guys are here." Tia says, and looking at Grissom with a regretful smile, "You boys didn't find enough, did you?"

A long pause as Grissom stands, kit in hand and smelling of hallway cleaner. "Evidence, I mean. You're not going to find him?"

And Grissom says simply, "No." having no energy to make conversation with a woman in the Tangeres' traditional gold lamee halter and suit pants. _A "Guide to Physics" book on his dresser at home._ _Elliot_ under his pillow where millions of fellow American's keep their nine mils.

The hallway is long.

**The unwholesomeness of magnets:**

The hallway is long enough that when he gets lost it takes him two minutes to find the elevator and once he gets to the parking garage, Tia Derek is sitting on his bumper.

"Win some lose some, right?" says Tia, lithe arms lifting herself from his second hand Porche. "You're still pretty sexy when you fail."

"Also," she says, "I'm the owner of the hotel so when we go to dinner- I'm paying for mine."

His hands are still chalky from the crime scene and the parking garage is overly dark because one of the light bulbs has burnt out. Her shirt catches sparks of light from the far off street lamp. It is the first time he has ever felt understood. And it is the first time he has understood what Maria Cristine might have felt.

**These guys always walk:**

A new guy at the lab. Calm enough, focused enough, but when Grissom meets him in the locker room, hand extended, the other man gives Grissom a tight smile and wonders, "Jeez Gil, do you ever get action in those shoes?"

While Grissom looks down at his worn sneakers the new guy continues, "You're level two right? You been promoted long?"

And Grissom, pondering the significance of frayed laces, responds earnestly, "Fifteen days I believe."

This is when the introduction is made. "I'm Ecklie. Conrad."

So with some small interest, "Well, welcome to the lab Conrad, if you-"

But Ecklie's not interested- eyeing Gil's creatures floating in murky jars, "It's a great space you've made here." And finally, eyeing Grissom, "Fifth highest solve rate in the country, right?"

Grissom hasn't checked the stats in months but Ecklie is already pulling on his own pair of expensive leather shoes and Grissom- recognizing them with eerie certainty- nods. "Yes. I guess it is."

"Yeah well, I've been a level two for a couple-a-months. Great lab though. Nice people."

So when Ecklie suggests they get a drink: "Just talk a little, lay out the foot work," Grissom is remembering fifty meters of hallway and a girl who was a billionaire, shoving him down onto the mattress on her floor. Holding him down to whisper in his ear-

"Alright," says Grissom- wondering where Conrad Ecklie's shoes could possibly lead.

**The location:**

The French Palace. Ecklie's shoes have led them to a strip club. Led them to a building where there is glitter falling into Grissom's hair and Ecklie saying, "Gil, I'll buy the drinks, okay, but I want you to meet my friend first…"

Conrad's friend is tall and voluptuous, a false red head with false lashes and false breasts. Apparently she has really opened up to him in the last few visits.

That's what Conrad says, emphasizing the words "opened up" _just so_, and now Grissom isn't sure he was witnessing innuendo or self-delusion.

"Excuse me," Grissom says to a heavyset man in a rumpled business suit, "may I take your napkin?" The man is intent on a curvaceous body in fishnets and doesn't respond when Grissom reaches past his drink and takes several.

Grissom has a pen in his pocket and purple glitter in his hair. With one he is nearly positive he can determine the means by which the other arrived.

It will be fifteen minutes before he is interrupted by a pair of heels. It will be ten seconds before he looks up from his ink soaked napkins. It will be two hours before her next break and it will be no time at all before-

It will be very easy to-

It will be the second time a pair of shoes has led to a pair of shoes has led to a pair of eyes has led him to-

It will be fifteen minutes. One hundred and twenty three dollars in bulk glitter.

**Influence:**

The night he leaves San Francisco, Sara Sidle doesn't eat dinner. Not hungry and too buzzed to sleep, she runs her apartment stairs thirty seven times before she loses count and grits her teeth, pressing her forehead against the railing. _Don't._

She skips breakfast the next morning, watching her friends eat pancakes with frosting sugar and glistening berries at their Friday morning diner. That's okay, she still isn't hungry.

By Monday afternoon she calls in sick and Professor Gilchrist has a student- someone she doesn't really know and doesn't really want to know- come by with copies of the notes. But before he leaves she finds herself saying, "Do you know why you shouldn't put milk in coffee?" It isn't really a question but she is discouraged when he supplies no answer. The apartment door closes, the kettle boils. She hasn't eaten in four days and she's making tea.

By Tuesday evening she's under her blankets with the blinds slatted at an angle, casting shadows. Two and a half pots of tea, the dregs of which in cups on various apartment surfaces and the rest of which heaved violently into the bathtub while her friends were arguing over movie selection.

She'd had to run the taps on full to drown out the sound. She'd had to put her hands inside the bathtub to brace her. And when she was finally breathless- dry heaving, fingers down her throat and Carly knocking on the bathroom door- she had to consider the possibility that something was wrong.

Under the blankets the light is a curious cast of grey and yellow so that when she slides her hand down, and down, slowly, _slowly_- not even really sure what she's doing because, god, she's only ever done this once before in secondary school- she can still see her body, pale and suddenly very small. _Don't don't don't._

When it's over and she comes (which she's also only ever done once before) she spends a moment, trying to remember if she even thought about him at all.

That evening she goes by the campus and shows up in her psychology teacher's classroom with Tai food and messy hair. He's just leaving and the house lights are already off, but when he sees her- take out boxes in her arms, he puts his brief case down.

They don't eat with chopsticks, which are too delicate an art for this occasion and she doesn't consider the possibility that she's just replaced one intelligent man with another. Instead she says, "I don't think I wasn't hungry so much as that I didn't want to _be_ hungry." And when he nods she decides to believe he understands.

**The Victim/Perpetrator dynamic:**

"What are you doing?"

Two voices at once and hers is one of them.

"Calculating how long he can afford a pretty girl like you, right Gil?"

Ecklie's is the other.

She is standing on the stage in front of him, red G-string, red sequins appliquéd to her nipples in the shape of stars- these ruby red shoes and he's thinking, _"not in Kansas anymore."_

"I don't think I could," says Grissom, "afford you." and because he's not exactly sure what he means, he stands to leave. "Conrad, I think the evening is done for me."

But Ecklie is barely listening again, "Alright Gil, just remember what I said about those sneakers."

Ecklie is maybe thirty-four and when Grissom takes one last look at Ruby Slippers; finds her eyes to make amends for all of this, he recognizes the look on her face.

"I hope this is a phase he grows out of," says Slippers and Gil Grissom feels like laughing.

So he does.

He laughs and she smirks and makes a dipping motion with her hips- her form of an invitation. _Sit down._

"Cat," she introduces with just a little too much drawl, "innuendo optional." And maybe he can stay another moment.

"Cat," he tries but the name is blunt and clumsy. "Well… if you want," he concedes at last.

"Like a flavored condom, right? Nothing real." And when he nods his head almost emphatically and makes reference to a particular chemical brand of cherry flavoring, she makes the suggestion that will change an impossible number of things.

"You wanna give me a new name?"


	3. Chapter 3

_Note: just finish it. If you don't then you won't get it. If you do then you will. It's pretty simple._

_P.S: Sorry, I'm pissy when it comes to people reading my work. They tend to ignore blatant instructions. If you don't ignore blatant instructions then... never mind._

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**Conflicting evidence:**

The offer stands, shimmers in the air- in a room, in a club where things are made to shimmer. And she lays down in front of him. Arches her back with her hair spilling into teased waves and her heels pressing into the glossy stage. To Grissom she looks tired, too thin- almost reminiscent- and when she parts her lips, as though in orgasm, he speaks before she can.

"How about Catharine?"

Her mouth closes. Then opens again falsely plaintive. "But that's already my name."

"No, I believe yours is with a K."

And she says, "so what are you writing, _Gil?_" To which he rhetorically asks, "Do you know what it costs to keep this glitter falling at an approximate rate of 1.5 lbs per second?"

She does not pause for breath. "Seven and a half G a night- plus custodial staff. It's a luxury buy. The owner runs this place half-into the ground every year or so. Every time his wife has an affair."

**Serving a warrant:**

Sara, the second time he hears her voice for the first time. A DB at The Monaco and Nick on the roof in dust covered pants. Three limp forms on the ground around him and, "I don't even have to turn around," slipping from Grissom's lips before he knows it.

She will never fall out of love with him now, and maybe that was always his intention.

She is receptive- falls for the appeal of a mind that can strategize, rationalize, _impersonalise_.

In Vegas, Sara Sidle is too subtle a creature- too self-paranoid and manic. Warrick will hold this against her for three months and Catherine, longer than that. But Grissom sees excitement in her slender hands. He sees the anticipation of a hundred future coffee cups- the styrofoam she will rip apart.

"_Like lighter fluid in bulk," grimaces the frenzied brunette he does not yet know-_ and he can let himself believe she wants to be here- wants the Vegas desert wind, rattling her windows at four PM.

Because in truth, Warrick is not the suspect- is only, really an excuse for a warrant. The permission Grissom will need to draw (her) closer, search the spaces she keeps, creeping through her with insatiable curiosity.

He will spend years trying to avoid thinking of this first endeavor as entrapment.

**Indeterminable motivations:**

In the strip club Grissom has stalled, pen to paper and the ink runs out in a circular blot. Catharine is adjusting the skinny ankle straps on two hundred dollar heels- the skin beneath is raw and blistered. She is talking business psychology with her leg over her head.

"Catharine…" he tries, almost tentatively, "what do you do?"

Ecklie and his shoes are disappearing out the door, a girl on his arm- not nearly the fantasy he is leaving behind him and Grissom sees his co-worker shoot a single distasteful glance in their direction. Squint his eyes.

Conrad is secretly near sighted.

"You mean what do I do outside?" Catharine says like it's frivolous- some distant vacation. She is smoothing the star over her left breast back into place. Busy fingers, but she stills a moment to glance about the buzzing room. Through the commotion she picks out a man, aging, watching from a distance and it's a shock to see _him_ here. "Forensics," says Catharine. "You wouldn't know it looking at him, but that guy over there? He's _good_… besides, the books and lessons are free." And a beat before: "Mostly."

With her shoes in place she recedes to the pole, hips swaying, watching him over her shoulder.

As a scientist he has never believed in fate. It will really be difficult if he finds he has to revise his hypothesis now.

**Alibi:**

They go for pizza across the highway at the place where the waiters used to be strippers before they got out. Guys and girls with icing coated faces and greasy hair.

"Mostly, it's because they got on the wrong side with a whale," says Catharine, dangling cheese into her mouth. "People think they're not any good but mostly it's just politics." and when she leaves, she leaves her phone number and a 200 percent tip. "Our waiter used to be in the big time," she concedes and then, playing from Grissom's stutter-shook glance, "Are you confused or jealous? Because I'm not… well you know- I'm… not really a fan of exclusivity."

He stumbles through with, "Oh, no- I'm just. Well you're not- I never assumed that we might-" Before she pinpoints their conversation.

"Yet."

**No longer manslaughter:**

And when the conversation comes around to whose house, to destination- she gives him a careful look in the rear view mirror before announcing.

"If we're going back to my place- then just… well don't freak out at me when you see the coke on the coffee table, kay? Because- I don't want to- I mean I'm not-," and swinging the wheel; too tired to even begin, "-I really want you and that's just all."

**Drawing parallels:**

A girl who was a billionaire, shoving him down on her mattress on the floor- holding him down to whisper in his ear- "We're enough. We're enough. _We're_ _enough_."

Her breath smells like menthol and she breaks the neck of her shirt to get it off, grasping at him before either of them is ready for anything. "Are you here?" she asks once, twice. She grabs his face in her hands and when they kiss his eyes are open and hers are closed. A girl with a billion dollars and a beer fridge in the corner…

And she whispers in his ear. _"Tell me we are."_

**Most perpetrators plan only up to the event:**

In Catharine's house there is a liquor cabinet instead of a beer fridge. A skylight and a Jacuzzi with a jet cycle, that- as they discover- will shut off after two minutes. Appropriately, when she comes back from the kitchen she announces, "It's not like I can afford this shit," and Grissom sees she has a bottle of champagne and a two-kilogram jar of Kraft peanut butter.

She is dressed in satin red pajama bottoms and a spandex t-shirt, which she abruptly strips off. Grissom would like to ask her to put it back on and then remove it again, slower this time, so that he could dissect the motions of her. Instead he accepts a flute and watches her pour. She must have coked up in the kitchen. She's lightning quick and too sincere to be straight.

"If you can't afford a thing, then why buy it?" he wonders, examining a statuette of a naked woman- fingers in her mouth. "You wouldn't have to dance."

That's when she looks him in the eye, leans forward- pressing him into the bed one more time, and he knows: he's asked the wrong question again.

"Well then I guess the real question-," she breaths, rolling her hips against him and stretching her arms above her head, "-the real question, I guess, is _why dance_?"

"I guess it is," he says.

Once she feels him getting hard she sits back down, Indian style on the bed and passes him a spoon.

"Why do you work doubles? And don't cite money- that's BS." She places the peanut butter between the two of them and tucks her hair behind her ears, anticipating an answer she can combat.

Instead Grissom takes her hand in his with peanut butter fingers and turns it palm up. Examining.

"Definition." He says at last. "I think it's about definition."

He knows she understands.

**Cold case:**

A ring found at a crime scene. The delicate inscription of, "_Always and Forever."_ Scratched into the shining inside surface of the band and the potential to make a match between font style and boutique.

Grissom begs Catharine to run the search for 18 hours before losing her to a 4:19 on the strip. Left to stare after her as her voice echoes back, "what's the matter Grissom? First time checking out the ice?" she's still in heels- maybe she needs the focus. He likes to believe there was never anything so messy as need between them but maybe that's _his_ focus.

Count on Catharine to understand before he ever could.

**Without a trace:**

His first case, he supposes, was a kidnapping. A missing girl. Grissom shouldn't consider it his fault then, that he didn't discover the ransom until May twenty third and by that time everyone was studying for finals, too busy for breakfast at Denny's and triple thick milkshakes from the specialty store beside campus.

Years later he will wonder if that set the president.

Sara is standing under a billboard mouthing words over the roar of traffic. He can't hear either. Sara is standing under a picture of perfection; oblivious that it only serves as her halo and he's thinking maybe deprivation is a form of addiction.

Over their five AM breakfast that morning, Grissom never though to ask Maria whether she intended to start eating again, once she was sure she had nothing left to lose.

**Re-offender:**

A woman in a jewelry boutique collapsing into 500,000 dollars worth of diamonds. Grissom standing stunned, just feet away. He is the first of several gentlemen to recover his senses and kneel to check her vitals.

Weak pulse and her skin is cold. Grasping her wrist, he can feel the bones beneath, the pull of gaunt skin over her knuckles and he laces his fingers through hers for just a moment, sickened to realize he can feel the Proximal Phalanges as small and light as the bones of birds. The bird weight of her sorrow.

She is old, frighteningly so. Maybe only forty-five but her cheeks are dawn and eyes hollow. Lately, he is only used to seeing this in teenagers.

He stands and looking down at his shoes edging beneath her confident blazer there is nothing for him to do. She is familiar so he doesn't want to check her wallet. He doesn't want to do this simple act.

The leather of her purse is fine, wealthy. His fingers on the zipper and he can smell varnish and cigarettes and some careful cinnamon smell. He doesn't want this. He doesn't.

When it's her he puts the wallet calmly back and turns away. "Maria Cristine" he tells no one in particular, a man with a suit and brief case.

People with briefcases remember things as a rule. He has to leave before he is sick on the expensive tile floor. There is no room for hysteria. Not at a scene like this. The way she has fallen, lying still amidst glinting stones.

He never does find a match to the scripture. His experience is humbling, if perhaps equal parts twisted coincidence. After all this time he never saw it coming. Her feminine voice asking for "a closer look at that one, no- on the left." And her nervous hands splayed against the clean glass casing, the way he remembers them, scribbling mysterious numbers. Grissom still wonders…

"I'm not sure I'll ever get this enough."

**Experimentation:**

"You wanna be different?"

Charlotte in the lab- in his personal space. She's satirical and he has never known how to do this. He wants to be different; of course he wants to be different. He wants to remember that God Damn physics book on his dresser; he wants to know what Robert Frost felt in his winter woods. He wants he wants he wants.

"-Up against a wall and lay one on me like you mean it!" Charlotte is saying. She says, "Lay _one _on me" and he has to assume she is speaking of a kiss. He cannot be here; he has work to do.

Trouble with Warrick and Holly Gribbs.

He will stay in his office until dawn, drive home listening to _Pink Floyd_ and teach himself the principles of mosquito anatomy.

As he leaves, Catharine will be pulling into the parking lot for a double and wiping peanut butter from her fingers, she will smile- Lindsay's lunch on her hands.

**Re-occuring circs:**

Two months later, Sara Sidle, new in the crime lab and already exhausted, asks him to hold her ring while she pushes her hands into wet clay. Her hair is messy and she's operating on too little sleep to remember pleasantries.

A B and E with possible hostage situation- the case made difficult because it took place in a pottery shop. Fifty-one hours in and she's approaching desperation.

"_The first twenty four hours is golden." _

phrases echo inside these walls.

Her finger tips trace his palm when she places down the band and, _"it's just Sara," _he assures himself but "just Sara" is still "Sara" is still something he can't quite manage to smother with too much Blue Hawaiian and triple shifts created out of him own necessity.

"On the table?" he asks of the ring and hair falls into her mouth when she gestures awkwardly towards an available space not occupied by broken shards.

For a moment they don't speak and he is terrified that she is going to ask him to pull the rogue strand from her mouth. He is not entirely sure if that is something he can do. Instead she smiles her Sara-smile and gnashes her teeth, scrunches her nose, works her tongue, half blushing until the hair slides sticky from her mouth. _Ungraceful_ and his breath is shallow.

The ring gives a thin click on the glass tabletop where he places it and there is something about the sound it makes that causes them both to turn- something about the fact that it's hers that causes Grissom to extend his hand. Investigate a hunch.

**New evidence:**

He's going deaf and his Vic was going crazy. Then she killed herself.

Just one double shift is all it takes when her face had previously been worth a half a million.

And it's Sara, supporting herself against the evidence table- quite alone. "You must have been so desperate."

"They're lists of intakes." she explains an hour later, too calm and ignoring Grissom who is motionless in the background. If she doesn't look at him, he can't know that she feels this way all the time.

"This is negative intake and this is positive. If the calories in column A don't equal the calories in-" but he isn't paying attention anyways. He's just remembered:

Maria Cristine writing lists on the backs of all her pages.

**Summation:**

In the end it is Catharine who says it best.

With Warrick hanging his head in a room across the lab, feet locked behind the legs of a chair and he swears he's back in elementary school. He is age reduced and shameful but Catharine can brush her bangs aside and say:

"Listen, Gil- we all need a looking glass to fall through. It's just a distraction from the victim/perpetrator dynamic, that's all."

And when confronted:

"Not on the lab's time, Catharine… not on Holly Gribbs' time."

Can conclude:

"You know last night I burnt Kraft Dinner? I was making it for Lindsay and- I don't know, I… fell asleep."

"Catharine, I understand that you-"

It's fiery Catharine who can persist with a hand in the air- forcing back his words.

"Look. All I mean is I feel like I'm standing in the middle of a B and E. not just last night- all the time- and not just me… we all do it. We all hear sirens, commotion, things get broken and be damned if I can even remember what I might have had that's missing." She pauses, takes Warrick's file from Grissom's hands. Flips to the last page.

Grissom has been looking for evidence hidden there; Catharine finds only suggestion. But she reads the words of a man who has yet to meet her daughter- reads them like she knows the moment he made his first mistake.

"'Crime doesn't stop, so neither do we.'" She quotes. Shrugs her shoulders. "In the words of a gambling addict… And it doesn't get any straighter than that."

It is Catharine who can climb the pole with blistered feet.


	4. Chapter 4

_Finally, please know: I don't write fics to be obvious. If there were meanings you didn't get it's probably because I wanted it that way. I would also love to answer any questions about the fic. The feed back I like most is mention of favorite parts and least favorite parts (that could be changed). And questions... they prove you were listening. Thanks._

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**Always secure the scene:**

When the scripture on Sara's ring turns out to be identical to his own lost cause, he walks quietly from the room. The other band is in a zip lock on his fish board and suddenly, he wants to lock his fingers through Sara's to feel the weight of her there.

Very suddenly he is not entirely convinced that she isn't a girl at a party in wet chiffon.

He has been on the job too long and now he knows. He has heard that when cases link to cases link to personal troubles and personal lives and persons of interest to people who are pretending they are not interested on an extremely personal level then it may very well be time to go and this is something he cannot afford.

This net of remembrance.

Maria in diamonds, Tia offering him a half empty bottle, Catharine's hands. Catharine in ruby shoes, Maria on the closet floor and Sara's hands in all that clay.

And maybe he was always going to be ending up here. A simple enough conclusion: all type A's burn out too fast. Some of them find a way to use gravity. Many create their own methods by which to fall.

Too many fingers with too many actions and he wants to know where the past stops and the present is caught- the sound of arriving moments… beating blue wings in Sara's hair.

Supposed to have been a different girl.

**A difficult interrogation:**

She cuts herself once. She's in the public washroom at the San Fran Rotating Restaurant with an Exacto-knife in her hand and the metallic drip of her own blood in the stainless steel sink.

Outside the door is Dr. Henry Gilkrist who is waiting for her to come back to dinner so that he may continue rubbing his foot along the length of her leg beneath the table. Being a social psychology professor he is adamant that sexual teasing should not be confined to the use of women.

There is an attractive, intelligent man waiting for her.

There is a fifty-dollar steak waiting for her.

Sara does not know what to do.

When the phone call came she was irritated, having forgotten to turn her cell phone on to vibrate while in such a luxurious location. Gilkrist had watched her slipping from her seat with dexterity, had ordered for them as she pressed the "Talk" button, in search of a place more suitable for phone conversation.

Five months since a single January evening in a drafty coffee shop.

"Sara? It's Grissom."

She held the phone, touched her lips, fisted her other hand, realized that she was breathing hard into the receiver and he could probably hear her.

She hung up.

In a slowly rotating bathroom Sara remembered an article she had once read about self-infliction. She found the Exacto-knife she kept in her purse for cutting out magazine articles while the library attendants weren't watching. "Better than morphine," one of the sufferers said and she had always wondered if there was any truth to that.

She misses the sunset, apologizes through dessert and insists that she needs to get home to study. Then she takes the long way down through the city on foot, high heels and all. When she passes a jewelry store it occurs to her that no one has ever bought her anything involving Carats. There is something sad about this and she enters the shop with eyes already casting about for some clue as to why these things should not suit her.

She buys herself a single gold band that evening, pays the equivalent of a months food budget in one go and is suddenly glad to have kept just that one credit card. Back on the street, her feet are raw and her hands are oddly cold.

She'll go home- call Grissom back and with his voice static-y over the line she will force herself to pretend it belongs to Gilkrist. While they speak she will trace the long angry mark that runs deeply across her palm and she will not cry when the receiver is put down at four AM.

_At least friends_.

Five months since a single January evening. Five months less a day since he stood over her in an aisle, carpet burnt and clumsy and it was then that he had to ask, _"Are you alright? Sara? Are you hurt?"_

She finds it ironic. That may have been the only question he could have asked that she doesn't know how to answer.

**Compartmentalize:**

He never would have pictured Sara with a ring. Complicated Sara with no fingernails and no patience. Maybe she wears it all the time- it is an epiphany to Grissom, sometimes, that there are things he is terribly poor at observing.

That night he rides the roller coaster six times- is contemplating a seventh before it begins, significantly, to hail. He returns to the lab, only when Sara's double shift is safely over.

Tonight is not the first time it has flickered in his mind that she looks at all her cases exactly, _exactly_ in the way she looks at him.

A moment on pavement made warm by the autumn sun. Observers emerge from The Monaco. Their shadows cut into the pale morning surfaces and he turns around to see her there; hips out, lips twisted up into an expression he will never place- by consequence, never forget. Her placid features and inside she's constantly thinking, _"don't you dare get to me- don't you dare."_

On every case, Grissom wears safety gloves. _"I don't even have to turn around," _he said and if he had to choose, he would say it was then he took them off.

A wise man once said to stay away from things that cannot be rationally explained. _"Here there be monsters."_

Grissom remembers this and so, before he walks from Sara's room of broken pottery shards, before he does a single thing he turns to face her and calmly asks, "Sara? Where did you get this inscribed?"

At the time, her hands are covered in clay and it's as good an excuse as any he's likely to get.

He doesn't even touch her.

He has paperwork on his desk. He'll get to that before he gets to her.

**Blood drops:**

Catharine's hair in his mouth and he is pushing inside of her- forgetting, trying to remember, trying to forget all the words, words, words that mean sex, fuck, orgasm, cum, vagina, love.

He is gasping into her neck, her perfume like the smell of roses and when he goes to whisper he is counting on the jets to drown him out.

"I don't think-" he stutters and when they turn off he is still speaking- still stumbling forwards. "I don't think I can afford you."

Later, when they are both pale, gasping on the rough concrete of her bathroom floor with her hand gripping the cuff of his boxer's absentmindedly, she says, "you know the first blow is free."

This, he finds, is murder tactics and oh, he's good here.

"What happens if one blow is enough?" he wonders, not touching her. Letting her touch him. Carefully She pulls herself onto her knees and her hands go between his legs, exposing her intentions. Licking her lips slowly.

"One blow usually is." and lowers her head, her perfect mouth so close... At the last moment she pauses, looks into his face a moment, "but if the killer doesn't know what he wants…"

She is kneeling over him now, needing to do this, and he can't help but wonder if she has simply been trying to find her way to her knees all along. If maybe this is praying, the only way either of them knows how.

He will finish her sentences for her. Besides, her tongue is too good for any of the words he knows.

"If the perpetrator doesn't know what he wants… then he usually keeps swinging." And it would be funny. It really should be funny.

**Re-opening the case:**

He's going deaf and his Vic was going crazy. Then she killed herself. Because she was so beautiful, he reasons, Grissom watches Catharine closely about the lab for three days straight, wondering whether she identifies-

On the morning of the third day Sara comes into his office looking for a fight. Her eyes are wide and her clothes are rumpled. Too much coffee and he knows the feeling.

She says, "I didn't want to look at the clock." And then again, "I _never_ want to look at the clock." She raises her nails to her mouth, chewing at stubs, and discovers herself suddenly fighting a yawn.

He finds it tragic.

They are both white knuckled and there is no grace here.

He wants to taste her breath. He wants to spell the way she moves- moves around him, careful and achingly intent. This can't ever be friendship but it's all he can understand when she's bracing herself, right there in front of him with her masochistic tendencies on display.

"I cant-" she tries and then, "I need-" and then just those lilting lips and disenchantment in the eyes.

Two years in Las Vegas and he cant tell if she's in her box or his- if he's in his box or hers- if there's even ownership at all.

He has already caught her eye, her tongue; he has wrapped himself around her synapses. His cruelty is delicious, self-serving, _irrational_. Eighteen years old and standing by the poolside with a college student. Gil Grissom, directing the conversation to his own ends.

His favorite part of Sara exists on the inside and is not for the human eye to see. He finds it tragic.

Relationships repeat themselves, he supposes. Masochists are rarely without their share of sadism, and they will certainly never become the perfect specimen of a human heart.

Inferiority,

Superiority,

Minority,

Majority,

Conformity,

Always. Off. Balance. And. He's. So. Sorry.

He thinks now he knows what Frost felt, standing in the midst of his lovely woods. Because of course the poem was never about the forest at all- was _always_ about the miles ahead.

When suspects repeat themselves it often means there's something important in the subtext. "The lady doth _persist_ too much me thinks." A variant on Shakespeare.

And now they have this moment between them. Scrapbook cast offs to cling to.

Grissom wants to devour her name but cant.

He will make the _wrong_ decision because at least it is _defined._ He will do laundry in his spare time and sleep on clean sheets with the bird weight of her determination on his mind.

_And miles to go_

_And miles to go_

And one day, maybe-

There is no room for hysteria here.

**But before:**

A night spent with Catharine. The residue of pale emotions and oil on his skin as the light arrives. He showers in his own apartment in the morning with the inexpensive shampoo he buys from the dollar store three blocks down.

She almost cries that day when her fingernail breaks and falls into the lap of a wealthy lawyer. "You _love it_," she purrs, ablaze. "A pussy with a broken nail…" and hands here, hands there.

He tips her a little extra when it's over.

Grissom's house seems small for a few days. Her eyes, big, the next time he sees her. Too much coke and a guy named Ed is waiting, so she really has to go. But he speaks quietly, under the music and the falling glitter and she hears him.

"If you'd like a job, we've got a place for you at the lab. You'd just have to test… I know you'd do well."

So now she wraps her expensive coat around her arms and holds a hand up to Ed in a distant acknowledgement and she drops her head a moment- the only time he's ever seen her look away.

"I wouldn't have to- I wouldn't… _be able_ to dance would I?"

"No… which is why I need to know: Catharine, can you do this?"

She begins fumbling for her cigarettes in her coat pocket, finds a condom (laughs because it's cherry), a film canister, a dollar. Gives up and looks at Grissom again. Only one clipped sigh and she's smiling now.

"Well… _yeah_. I'll just have to learn to live outside the box." She says, "I think I can manage… but… you might have to teach me."

And with a smirk she turns away, looking for Eddie to take her home- Eddie to take her in the bathtub with no important revelations, with no pain of his own and no need for hers. No calculations or blisters or hands that smell like latex gloves. She turns away.

And that's when Grissom knows that they have one more revelation to share. To prop like a support beam amidst the high places they have found- and they have made.

"I do have a box," he says and he can tell when she doesn't turn around, that she has known this all along.

She leaves him there to contemplate the ways she'll come apart if this goes wrong.

Leaves him alone, calculating the perimeter of a crash in the shape of a human body.


End file.
